Interestingly, the Saudi authorities have announced that all economical assets seized from those found guilty will be confiscated as state property. Even a no-fly list has reportedly been drawn up, and security forces have been deployed in order to prevent private jet owners from leaving the kingdom." AMN

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Let's not kid ourselves. What the West calls "corruption" in business and government is the very basis of life in Saudi Arabia along with the the Wahhabi version of Islam, a version that resembles a bug frozen for all time in amber.

A lot of these business people and their companies (same thing normally in SA where true public companies are rare) will have long ago offshored much of their assets. Foreign bank accounts, dummy chains of shell holding companies leading to a pot of gold at the end of the chain, Foreign law firms that manage hidden assets as in the the Paradise Papers, these are all methods.

It is significant that MbS has imprisoned these people in a luxury hotel rather than putting them in house arrest where they could attempt to arrange to be smuggled out of the big sand box. He has also not put them in hotel style royal guest houses where they might have connections among the government people who run them. IMO MbS intends to beggar some of these people and geld the rest, figuratively speaking.

This purge of his possible enemies and rivals was well prepared. Key to preventing a counter-coup was the removal and replacements of the heads of the security services and the silencing of the Wahhabi ulema.' I earlier thought that MbS might act against the senior Shia ulema' but that may not be true. He has been engaged in "preaching" toleration of other than Wahhabism. Quelle horreur!! In this circumstance the Shia clergy may see MbS as a friend and he may leave them alone.

Might one someday see a church in Saudi Arabia like those in many other majority Muslim countries? Saudi Arabia as I have personally known it has been a theocratically driven police state. When I was DATT there I was repeatedly asked by attache colleagues to smuggle Filipino, Pakistani and other Christians into the secret Christmas services held in the US Embassy. I was glad to do so.

MbS has abolished the arrest powers of the Mutawi'iin, the religious "decency" police. These are the worthless, scrawny old bastards in short thawb who wander the streets beating women whose behavior they do not like. For that alone I am favorably inclined to him.

Unfortunately, he has foreign policy delusions of grandeur in which he is making common cause with redheiferland and the gaudy world of Trump Administration delusions about the Middle East. pl

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"Your statement indicates a mind set in which the little brown people have to be told what devilment to attempt. pl"

Something that greatly affected me a few years back. I had worked a couple of short periods with aboriginal people (black not brown) when I was young, that although a few differences in out outlook/background, worked the same as "white" people" and I simply thought of them as equals and thought no more of it. In many places there are aboriginal people who have lost their culture and so forth and the result is not good. This is what I was accustomed to.
In moving to an area where the people had moved from stone age hunter gather to the present in less than 100 years, in many cases within living memory, I was very unsure how to deal with them. Some local (white) people in the area told me how to treat blacks. It was something I could not do. I guess I must be some type of new age rainbow flag waving tree hugger or something, but I decided to treat them same as anyone else and pay the same wages as any other person I would have working for me.
Took awhile to get some workers as they had a great distrust for whitey's.
But one in particular I have never forgotten. Mid to late forties, when he introduced himself to me, said straight up he was and alcoholic.
After work, at the camp fire we always had two or three beers every night. He never asked for more.
After we had finished a stint of six weeks or so, I was heading to town for more supplies and the Derby rodeo so the two older blokes wanted to go in for that rather than go back to the community.
At the community, the elders told me I would never get D (introduced himself as alcoholic) back out of town once he got on the booze.
I dropped them in Derby and headed down to Broom as there was a few things I wanted there plus a weekend at a resort sort of place.
Monday morning, I pull into the petrol station at Derby to fuel the truck up before collecting and loading supplies for the next stint. As I was fuelling up, D turned up beside me, already with a cardboard cask or so under his belt, and asked me when we were leaving. What he said next totally stunned me and have not not been able to forget.
He said " I will go anywhere with you. You treat me like a man, not a blackfella"

I guess in your trade pl, you see more than anyone the shit that people do to each other, but.. a man in his late forties, a very honest and straightforward man, had never in his life been treated as a man by whites..

The other thing that happened - loading up with stores at the supermarket. It was also the grog shop and I would get about a pallet of beer along with food for the next stint out.
Alcoholism and drugs along with the associated crime required for acquisition, were a major problem with the aboriginal people that had moved to town, which was the majority. Always there were aboriginal people hanging in the supermarket carpark asking whitey's to buy them some grog.
Loading up the beer this day, for whatever reason, I had no one to watch the truck.
I came out and put the first couple of cartons on the truck, but the was a group of somewhat hostile aboriginal people siting on the curb near the front front of the truck. I was in a not so good situation as after putting a couple of cartons on the back, I could not leave it. Then being a bit green, I just thought f..k it and asked them to watch the truck for me.
The difference... they f..king watched that truck like hawks. The experience with the people of that area is something I will never forget.

And I look at the US and disciples bringing "freedom and democracy to brown people"

Not real sure how to take the "brown people" bit pl as you are hard to read, but I have no illusions based on peoples skin colour or culture. Smart and not smart, honest dishonest ect ect in all peoples.

I am hard to read? Good. If you are easy to read you are probably a little simple mended and unable to grasp the many facets of any situation. As for the "little brown people," and your attitude toward them , you seem inordinately proud of your ability to treat someone of another culture as an equal. I will say again, the tendency to treat people of other cultures as though they were born without original sin is quite repulsive and very paternalistic. The desire to believe that they are somehow better people thn Europeans is just silly and extremely dangerous. pl

Many years ago I once confessed that I found trying to understand the Middle East like trying to understand a game of checkers where the squares were moving around as well as the checkers.

If MBS is doing what you say, then he is artfully juggling several "flaming bobcats on meth". If so, he must be very careful. Because if even only one of those flaming bobcats on meth which he is juggling turns around and claw-chews his face off; that would spoil his whole day.

I am not AU, but I once saw someone who did indeed seem very close to black-leather black. He was working in a Grand Middle-Class Hotel I was once at a conference in, and his face had some symmetrical scar marks on it.
I think they were tribal identification scars but I wasn't about to ask.

Not thinking people other than Europeans are all good, rather that where religion or ideology does not interfere people are pretty much the same all over. Honest and dishonest and so forth.
A few years back, my 86 year old father was nearly killed because a do gooder judge believed that jailing violent young aboriginal men on made them worse. He had been in and out of jail since age seventeen, always committing another violent assault when let out on.
When he attacked my father he was 25 and it was only two hours after being released on bail for hitting and breaking the cheek of a sixty year old women.
Something about living in that part of Australia for couple of years did affect me in some way. Perhaps it was seeing the incompatibility of two different cultures and their laws that cannot merge.
I worked there as a contractor and when we could not reach a mutually agreeable deal for the next year, I left.

MBS - ? He is relatively young, is in a bit of a mess in Yemen, but from what I read here, seems to have put himself in a very strong position in SA. Remains to be seen if he is a survivor like Erdogan.

The women are quite comely.
There are Iranians who are as black as soot in Southern Iran. One who was traveling in North related how children would run their fingers across his skin to see if the color would come off.

Colonel,
racism is in all races - sounds trivial. But anecdotes help to illustrate - I met Sri-Lankan doctors who were as black as tar, but would be upset when one called them "Black". Chinese look down their noses on Caucasians , Germans have famously little regard for "Polen, Juden und Zigeuner".. etc etc etc.

What I do find exceptional is the response to treating another like a normal human which I think is why it affected me in some way
I saw more racism in that part of the country than I had realised existed. Then on the opposite spectrum, in the comment section of an article on aboriginal massacres at a university site, the politically correct offence that was taken when relating a story to do with history in the same words as used by the Aboriginal man.